In 2001 seventeen “organizational anarchists” got together in a ski resort in Utah to discuss how software development could be best done with a specific view to moving away from document driven development.

They believed that traditional forms of development disaggregated developers from customers. They wished to move software development to later in the cycle and improve customer centricity.

They were fans of a variety of software development methods including Extreme Programming, scrum, DSDM, Adaptive Software Development, Crystal, Feature-Driven Development and Pragmatic Programming. At the end of their seminar, they agreed the Agile Manifesto, which had twelve principles that can be seen below.